Gameplay Videos Posted

Through the last week I have added gameplay videos of my levels to the Sin, Unreal, Wheel of Time and Doom pages. Very nice way to show off my work to those who never played the games! Says a lot more than screenshots or text can. I’ll have to do a video of one of the Beyond Belief levels at some point, as well, but for now I’m done

Update: The Beyond Belief video is now posted on the Quake page!

Price Of Gas Around The World

Here is a great chart that shows the price of gas around the world. America, take note! Of all the western industrialized nations, the US even now pays the lowest price per gallon!

This is something I’ve been telling people over the past few months: gas is expensive, especially in Europe. It should be expensive, so that we appreciate it and don’t waste it. Growing up in Germany, I got used to paying $2 per liter (and the current price is over $9/gallon in Germany). So the current price adjustment in the US, regardless of how much hardship it might create for some people, is a good thing. It drives innovation. Those 30mpg cars that everybody is hawking now came from somewhere. They came from nations that have been paying $10/gallon for several decades, and who put a high premium on fuel economy. Nobody should argue the value of that – not in a time where the global warning scare is moving front and center.

Attention Dogs!

Hehe! More here.

Now Playing: Etrian Odyssey

The Gamestop in Petaluma is a weird little shop: when I couldn’t find Etrian Odyssey a year ago because it had sold out everywhere, I found that the Petaluma shop had several copies in stock. Now that Etrian Odyssey 2 is out,  I once again couldn’t find the game anywhere – until I went to the Petaluma Gamestop. The curious thing is that now that I own Etrian Odyssey 2, I’m playing the first part again, while saving the new one for an undetermined upcoming vacation.

I was hooked on Etrian Odyssey last year. Played it night and day, ignoring the big consoles and all books I’d been reading at the time. After many years, I was addicted to an oldschool RPG again. I mapped out dungeons, I killed monsters, I leveled up. Etrian Odyssey’s gameplay is a tried and true formula that appeals to our basic need to explore – something that Clint Hocking explained much more eloquently than I ever could in his 2007 GDC talk.

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Page Status

Wow, this page has turned out to be a lot more work than I expected. In a fun way, though – WordPress is making it so easy to add content that I’m going pretty crazy with all the stuff I’m putting in the database. As of this weekend, I have transferred over about two years of blog posts (and comments), written five of the game pages (the Unreal page just went up), and added all downloads from my old page. Things would be going even faster if I didn’t keep tinkering with the layout and sidebars of the page! After that I still have 7 years of blog posts to add, but that’s all backlog and can probably wait for a while.

Windows Vista, Part Deux

Glorious! Half the time when I close the laptop lid, Vista shuts down and reboots instead. When I choose “Shut Down” button after that the computer restarts instead. Reliably. On factory Dell hardware with proven hardware/driver combinations.

But even more fun, as I was working just now, Window all of the sudden closed one program after the next and shut down the computer with no warning, rhyme or reason. It then rebooted the computer.

W.T.F.?